Mavis Staple: The Circle and the Moan
By David Cantwell

You know, down in Mississippi where we came from…we’d have a good old revival meeting…Oh my Lord, did we have service…And the old people’d be singing the familiar hymns…And some old sister way over in the Amen Corner would begin to moan.  I didn’t understand that language!  And I asked my parents when I got home, I said what does she mean by moaning…Old man says, ‘Son, when you moan, even the Devil don’t know what you talking about.’ 
–Roebuck “Pops” Staples

At Memphis’ Orpheum Theater this past July, Mavis Staples found herself surrounded by nearly 200 dancing children.  Though several dozen of these kids were for some reason twirling umbrellas, Staples wasn’t performing “Singing in the Rain.”  Rather, she was singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a song she’s known nearly her entire life and one she’s now recorded five times throughout a career that spans half a century.

Mavis had been invited to Memphis to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Stax Music Academy, an urban, youth-based community program associated with the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.  Consequently, the audience was packed with family members craning their necks to spot a specific son or daughter or grandchild in the program.  That is, until the featured guest stepped from the wings.  It’s typical of the respect Staples commands as an artist that as soon as she stepped onstage, and despite real efforts on her part to keep the focus on the kids, all eyes were on Mavis Staples.

She’s only five feet tall, but her voice is giant—so husky, jagged, and instantly recognizable that when Prince produced an album for Staples in 1993, he titled it simply The Voice.  At the Orpheum, The Voice shouted and groaned as chants of “May-vis!” and “Preach it!” sprang up around the hall.  Her hand on the back of her hip, bent forward at the waist, her face a twisted grimace, she sang again that familiar song about following her mother’s body to the cemetery:  “Tried to hold up and be brave,” Staples testified, “but I could not-hold my saawww-roh! Lord! When they laid her! Her! In the grave…”

“There’s a better home a-waiting!  In the sky, Lord! Oh my!  In the sky!”

Then Mavis let out a long, slow, excruciating moan.  This multi-syllabic moan was filled with so much suffering that it was a truly hideous thing to hear.  But as she stretched her moan out, her voice somehow became beautiful, too, and without losing any of the previous horror.  And her grimace progressed into a bright, wide smile.  And she sang again: “There’s a better home a-waiting.”

The week before her Orpheum show Mavis was at home in Chicago where she discussed her own losses during a lengthy phone conversation.  It was just a day before her 65^th birthday, and she was in a mood to look back at her life, and to mourn the absence of those no longer by her side: Mavis’ own mother, Osceloa Staples, died in 1987, her father Roebuck Staples, died in 2000, and her younger sister, Cynthia, died not long afterward.

But Staples was in a mood to celebrate too: “I’m trying to lose some weight—I’m too short to be chubby—but I’m gonna have to have me some champagne tomorrow!”  She was also eagerly, if a bit nervously, anticipating her slated performance of “America the Beautiful” at the Democratic National Convention in Boston.  Most of all, she was excited about the release of Have a Little Faith, her first solo album in almost a decade.

“Really, this album is the one I think of as my first solo album,” she said. “The other albums I’ve done were always just me trying my wings, but I never had any thoughts of leaving the family.  But now, it’s a must that Mavis goes solo.  I’m on my own.”
*****
Mavis Staples was born in Chicago, and she became world famous with music recorded in Memphis and Muscle Shoals.  Her story really begins, however, in Mississippi. As a young man, Mavis’ father, Roebuck “Pops” Staples, worked, as she recounts in her new song “Pop’s Recipe,” at that state’s “Dockery Plantation, picking cotton for ten cents a day.”

Cotton picking was grueling, Sisyphean toil—row after row, field after field, year after year.  But the one priceless benefit to accrue to Staples for his production of another man’s profit was exposure to two other men employed at the plantation, blues men Chester Burnett (AKA Howlin’ Wolf) and, especially, Charlie Patton, who inspired Pops to learn guitar.

Years later, when Mavis was a young woman, Pops took his children on a tour of the old home place, that stretch of the Delta in which he and their mother had grownup, met and married, and had their first two children, Cleotha and brother Pervis.  “Pops showed us where he was born [Winona, Mississippi, in 1915] and where he courted momma and where he proposed,” Mavis recalls today.  “He pointed out where he bought his first guitar—it was a hardware store—and he showed us the cemetery with his grandparents’ headstones. He showed us where he used to pick cotton.  Mm, mm, mm.” Her voice trails off.

“And he showed where they burned down the house!” she says, suddenly laughing.  “Momma and daddy were out in the field picking cotton and they saw the smoke. They threw down their bags and ran to the house and there was Clethie and Pervis cooking mud pies!  In the house!  It was just a small wooden house, didn’t’ take long to burn down.”

Their house destroyed, and the Great Depression leaving even fewer opportunities than normal for black Mississippians, the Staples decided in 1937 to head north to Chicago.  Several of Roebucks’ six brothers and seven sisters had already made the trip, joining in a Great Migration that before the close of the Second World War would number in the millions.

“He had so many brothers and sisters growing up that they had a ready-made choir,” Mavis says.  “Pops would tell me stories about when they would all finish dinner they would go out on the gallery and sing. (The gallery was the porch. I had to ask him, ‘Gallery? What’s a gallery, daddy?’ He says, “It’s the porch, Mavis.’)  They’d sing and people would start coming, and the yard was just full.

“Now, the parts his sisters would sing on the gallery is the parts that later on he taught us.  That was us.  When my brothers and sisters and me started traveling around as a group, we’d come out and people’d go, ‘Ohhhhhh!’  They was surprised because they thought we would be old people, cause of how we sang together.  Cause of how we sounded like Mississippi.”
*****
Roebuck, Osceola, and their two children arrived in Chicago in 1937.  Pops quickly found work at the Armour Meat Packing facilities in the city’s bustling stockyards, and he and Osceola’s third child, Mavis, was born two years later.

“You know, I’ve read so many books that says I was born in 1940.  And I go along with it,” Mavis says, laughing.  “If you give me a year, I’ll take it!  But I was actually born in 1939.”

Roebuck and Osceola worked hard to raise righteous, God-fearing children.  Playing cards were forbidden in the house, and the children weren’t allowed to go to the movies unless Pops chose the film and chaperoned.  He also did his best to insure the children listened to nothing but gospel music.  Pops, who especially admired gospel quartets, played his favorite 78s around the house, and when the Swan Silvertones or Dixie Hummingbirds visited town, or when local heroes the Soul Stirrers performed, the Staples family would go out to the program.

Not that the Staple kids had to be persuaded to love their parents’ music.  After all, they not only came of age during gospel’s golden age; they experienced the era at ground zero.  Thanks largely to the songs of Chicago-based Thomas Dorsey (“Precious Lord,” ) as well as to the singing of his primary protégés, Sallie Martin and Mahalia Jackson, Chicago had become during the years of the Great Depression and the second world war, the nation’s biggest single market for gospel music.  Brought up in this environment, Mavis and her siblings could surely say with Dorsey that they liked “the solid beat” of gospel music, the “long, moaning, groaning tone…the rock.”

“My brother Pervis,” Mavis remembers, “had his own gospel group, and Sam [Cooke] was in another one, the Highway Q.C.’s.  And every Sunday after 11 o’clock service, they’d go into the church and have a battle.  The audience would just be all us kids, sitting out there eating potato chips.

Indeed, Mavis attended the same grammar school as two gospel and pop stars in waiting, Cooke and Lou Rawls.  What’s more, Jerry Butler and Curtis Mayfield, each a future soul legend and member of the Impressions, lived nearby.

“We lived down on 33^rd street, but all of us lived in the thirties; we called them the Dirty Thirties. That’s where all the doo-wopper boys would stand under the lamplight and sing in the summer time.”

In other words, despite Pop’s best efforts, his children were exposed to, and touched by, more than just gospel music.  When Pops and Osceola were out of the house, the kids would sneak shots of rhythm & blues on the radio.  Mavis enjoyed disc jockey Herb Kent (“Herb Kent, the Coooool Gent!”), especially during the early spring of 1952 when it seemed he was always playing Ruth Brown’s now classic “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean.”

Another of Mavis’ favorite numbers, to her family’s chagrin, was “Since I Fell for You,” a 1947 R&B hit for Annie Laurie.  When the family grew too large “for my folks to keep us in shoes,” Pop and Osceola sent their youngest children south; Mavis and Yvonne stayed with their grandmother in Mississippi during the school year, returning home to the Dirty Thirties for the summer.  One day the kids in grandma’s neighborhood had a variety show at school, and when Mavis’ turn came, she started belting out “Since I Fell for You.”

“I think I was about nine or ten,” she explains, “just a little bitty girl up there singing, ‘You! Made me leave! My happy home!’  I seen my uncle coming up towards the stage and I naturally thought he was coming up to pat me on the head when I was done cause I did such a good job.  But he didn’t say a word.   He just snatched me off that stage and we went on out of school.  He took me home and pushed me in the door and told my grandma: ‘This youngun is up at the schoolhouse singing the blues.’

“She says, ‘Oh you singing the blues, huh? You go out and get me some switches!’  I stayed out there a long time hoping it’d pass but she yells out, ‘Youngun, I ain’t forgot about you.’  So I go in with them switches and she gets to started.  Every lick she’d say, ‘You! Don’t! Sing! No! Blues! In! This! Fam! Ih! Lee!’

“After I got grown,” Mavis continues, “I recorded ‘Since I Fell for You’ [for her second Stax solo album, 1971’s Only for the Lonely].  By then grandma was living with us.  I took that record in there and played it for her, and she said, ‘You little booger!  That’s the song you were singing at school!  You never did forget that, did you?’

“‘I said, ‘No ma’am. But you can’t whip me no more.  I’m over 21!”
*****
At mid-century, Osceola Staples was working as a laundry supervisor at Chicago’s Morrison hotel and Roebucks worked construction with the Crane Company.  Pops was also trying to make it in the world of gospel music, singing with a group called the Trumpet Jubilees.  “They had six members but only two or three of them ever showed up for practice,” Mavis recalls, remembering a situation that frustrated to no end her ambitious and disciplined father.  One night in 1950, disgusted by yet another poor turnout at rehearsal, Pops came home, retrieved his guitar from the closet—“He got it at a pawn shop; I think he paid $7”—and called his family into the living room.  “I’m going to sing with my children,” he said.

With Pervis, Cleotha, Mavis and Yvonne gathered in a circle around him on the floor, Pops set to teaching them the harmony parts for “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”  “Circle” is popularly associated, of course, with country music.  But Pop knew the song not from the Carter Family’s famous recordings but because it is also included in traditional black gospel songbooks like the Gospel Pearl.  Roebuck sang the song as a child at church and out on the gallery with his family in Mississippi.

“We went down to Aunt Katie’s church, my father’s sister, and we sang ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken,’ and they clapped us back three times.  We had to sing ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken’ three times, too, cause that’s the only song Pops had taught us all the way through.”  Mavis was just ten years old—during the Staple Singers’ first public performance, she had to stand on a chair to be seen by the congregation—but her voice was already big and unaccountably deep.  “I sang bass, even then,” she explains.  “You know, a ladies’ bass.”

*****

It sold about 200, that first thing. [The United label] heard us…and liked us, so we recorded [“Wont’ You Sit Down” and “It Rained, Children”].  But the man who owned the company, he wanted us to do rock ‘n’roll…[and] we wanted no part of rock ‘n’ roll.  So he held us on contract for two years for that one record.  When his contract was up, Vee-Jay asked us to come and do a record…The first Vee-Jay record we made was “If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again,” and as it sold only 1,000 I thought Vee-Jay was disappointed with us, so we were ready to quit.  But Vee-Jay said “No, no, when will you be ready to go into the studio?” And I said, “I’m ready to go in now.”  So we went in and made “Uncloudy Day,” and it sold like rock ‘n’ roll.
–Roebuck “Pops” Staples, from Viv Broughton’s Black Gospel: An Illustrated History of the Gospel Sound

“Uncloudy Day” is a Roebuck Staples original that speaks of a better tomorrow even while sounding so mournful you fear its singers may not make it through to the end of the song.  The record was such a success, in part, because the Staples’ emphasis on harmony made them stand out in a gospel scene that tended to spotlight lead singers—either screamers, like Ira Tucker of the Dixie Hummingbirds, or sweet falsettos, like Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones.  But the gospel community also embraced “Uncloudy Day” because it was familiar.  The record’s focus on harmony reminded transplanted southerners of home.

Not that the Staples’ lead singer ever has been unimportant to the group’s sound.  “Uncloudy Day” begins with Pops striking a tremolo chord on his pawnshop guitar, and what follow are a verse and a chorus of Mississippi harmony.  When Mavis finally enters, alone, she heralds her own arrival on the national gospel scene with a slow, dramatic “Well, well, well” that sounds a good deal deeper than a ladies’ bass.

“When we’d come to sing in those days,” Mavis remembers, “some people would actually be placing bets among themselves:  ‘That can’t be a girl singing that part!’  We’d start all in harmony, you know, then Pervis would step up like he was going to sing my part.  People’d elbow each other then and say, ‘See, I told you that wasn’t no little girl.’ Then I’d sneak in behind and go, real low, ‘Well, well, well, oh…’ And the whole place would go wild!
“One time a fellow complained to Daddy that he’d lost his whole paycheck betting that wasn’t no girl singing.  Daddy told him, ‘Well, you shouldn’t bet!’”

An honest-to-God hit, “Uncloudy Day” allowed Pops to quit his job and the Staples to begin playing well outside of Chicago.  Over the next few years, the group followed its breakthrough hit with several more memorable and commercially successful Vee-Jay sides; highlights included “This May Be the Last Time” (another “R. Staples” composition, no matter what “Jagger, Richards” soon claimed) and, in 1960, the group’s first recorded version of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”  Still, because Roebuck was, in his daughter’s words, “always aggressive, always one step ahead,” the Staples’ patriarch moved his family to the Riverside label in 1960.

Riverside was a larger company with a focus on jazz.  The first result of the Staples’ move—increased exposure—was almost instantaneous.  For example, in 1961, the Staple Singers sang “Help Me, Jesus” at JFK’s inaugural, and the next year they were chosen by Downbeat magazine as Best New Vocal Group.  The second consequence of the Staples’ move to Riverside was a more diverse repertoire. Riverside encouraged Pops to supplement the group’s gospel material with songs that might appeal to the white college crowd, thus hitching a ride on the folk revival; at the same time, this was music that, as Pops liked to say, “still touched and uplifted people and started them on their way.”  At Riverside, the Staple Singers cut folk standards like “Old Cotton Fields Back Home,” “Dying Man’s Plea,” and “This Land Is Your Land,” and they sang new songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” and “A Hard Rain” by Bob Dylan.

Dylan, in fact, became particularly close to Mavis and her family.  “The first time we met him he knew our songs already, knew the words already to our songs, and he knew all of our names.  We’d run into him a lot…Pervis and Bob got to be really tight buddies. Everybody’d be sleeping, but they’d be sitting out on the stoop talking.”

“We actually courted back in the sixties,” she admits.  “Bobby was a cutie and I guess I was maybe a cutie too.  Off and on for several years, I guess, we’d write letters to each other and smooch.”

“Pops used to say, ‘I don’t know where this boy comes from, don’t know where he gets these great songs.’ One time he told him, ‘Bob, I think this is God’s gift to you.  His gift is that these words come into your head.’”
*****

Mavis and the Staples continued to inch their way to stardom throughout the 1960s.  They maintained their presence on the gospel circuit, filling churches and school auditoriums with the sanctified likes of Marian Williams, the Ward Singers, and the Caravans. At the same time, they increasingly offered their mix of folk and gospel with pop audiences, sharing stages with everyone from Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin to Moby Grape and Ten Years After.

The Staples’ attempt to reach beyond the gospel market was typical of the times.  It was an ambition that reflected, of course, the bigger paydays available to crossover acts, but it also revealed a desire among many artists to take a stand in support of civil rights.

Indeed, by the time Pops moved the family to Epic Records in 1965, he and his children were ready to sing not just of a heaven above but of what could be done right here, right now, to assist the movement that centered around Martin Luther King, Jr., what could be done to lighten the burdens of this world.

“We were in Montgomery, Alabama,” Mavis remembers, “and King was preaching that night at his church.  ‘I like this man Martin,’ Daddy said, ‘I like his message and I want to go to his eleven o’clock service.  Do you all want to go?’”

They did, and the result was a new focus for the group.  During the service, King acknowledged the group’s presence, and afterwards King met Mavis and her siblings, before speaking alone with Roebuck for several minutes. Back at the hotel, Pops famously told to his children: “If he can preach it, we can sing it.”

Over the next few years, working primarily with a young Nashville producer named Billy Sherrill, the Staples continued to record gospel songs, including a rousing new version of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” in 1966.  More and more, though, they recorded the songs Pops had been writing about specific racial dramas unfolding across the south, and as was appropriate to the broader political ambitions of these songs, Sherrill surrounded Mavis’ vocals for the first time with rhythmic, full-band arrangements.

“‘Freedom’s Highway,’” Mavis explains, “he wrote that one for the march from Selma to Montgomery.  ‘Why?  (Am I Treated So Bad)’ he wrote cause of the Little Rock Nine.  I remember Pops was in his recliner at home, and I was sitting on the floor watching the news, and just as those kids got to the door of the bus a policeman put his Billy club across the door.  ‘Why they doin’ that?’ Pops said.  ‘Why they treating them so bad?’

The song turned out to be Dr. King’s favorite:  “He’d always say to Daddy, ‘You gonna sing my song tonight?’  He loved that one.”

The Staples, Mavis says, played with King on at least four occasions.  After the last of these, during King’s expansion of the movement north to the Staples home base in Chicago, he asked them if they would play a month’s worth of Saturdays at the offices of Operation Breadbasket.  Later renamed Operation Push, the office was headed by a then mostly unknown Jesse Jackson.  “King asked us to play there because he thought if we did, folks would come out and they’d get to know Jesse.”

The Staple Singers’ Epic tenure produced some of their finest music but it was frustratingly brief.  Sherrill turned his attention elsewhere once he began scoring hits with country star David Houston, and though the last records the Staples made for the label included the first records of their career to crack the pop charts (a cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What’s It Worth” crept to #66), the label dropped them for poor sales in 1967. 
*****

The Message that Rock Music Is Still Looking For…
It picks up where the Bible leaves off.
–Advertisement for the Staple Singers’ 1973 album Be:Altitude

At Memphis’ Stax Records, where the Staple Singers next signed, they proceeded to cut a series of what they termed Message Songs.  From their very first album for the label, 1968’s Soul Folk in Action, to their last, 1974’s City in the Sky, the group set out to share with a far larger audience than they had before the very lesson they’d been preaching at this point for almost decade: A better world is waiting, but it takes something more powerful than just you or me to get there.

As critic Craig Werner puts it in A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America, this lesson is what can be called the gospel impulse.  In the civil rights struggle, the greater force had been a movement of people who accomplished together what individuals working alone could never have done.  “For the classic gospel singers,” Werner writes, “the source is god; for soul singers, it’s love…Whatever its specific incarnation, gospel redemption breaks down the difference between personal salvation and communal liberation.  No one makes it alone…[I]f we are going to…move on up, we’ve got to connect.  The music shows us how.”

“That’s right.  That’s exactly right,” Mavis says, comparing Werner’s words to her family’s intentions.  “You know, Pops would say that sometimes.  He’d say, ‘We don’t have to die to go to heaven; heaven could be right here.’  But he said we got to work together.  We got to work!”  Soul folk in action.

The song titles themselves—“Long Walk to D.C.,” “Washington, We’re Watching You,” “We’ve Got to Get Together,” “Got to Be Some Changes Made,” “Give a Hand Take a Hand,” “Touch a Hand, Make a Friend,” “Give a Damn,” “We’ll Get Over,” “We the People,” and “Respect Yourself” to cite only a few—tell the story.  Or at least they seem to, until you hear Mavis Staples and her family sing them accompanied by some of the best rhythm sections ever to lay down a groove.

The Staples had a number of major hits while at Stax, but for Message Song potential, none of them touches “I’ll Take You There,” a pop and R&B chart topper in 1972 that comes off Be:Altitude, the finest album of the group’s career.

 Produced by Al Bell and recorded in Alabama with the same version of the Muscle Shoals rhythm section that played on most of Aretha Franklin’s best records, “I’ll Take You There” begins with a single hard thwack by drummer Roger Hawkins who then lays down a skittering, irresistibly funky rhythm with the assistance of bassist David Hood who, for his part, is busy copping the bass line from British reggae hit “The Liquidator,” by the Harry J Allstars.

When Mavis enters, she initially offers a gospel moan—“Oh-huh. Mmmh”—so brief and yet so subtly evocative that it sounds as if she might somehow be giving birth, reaching climax, toting a heavy bale, and experiencing her final death rattle all at the same time.

She knows a place, she tells us, where there are no tears or worries.  A place where, she assures us, there are no smiling but lying faces of the sort warned about in soul group Undisputed Truth’s hit from the previous summer.  She can take us to this place, but only if we join her and offer assistance as needed.  “He’p me,” she pleads.  “Come on, somebody he’p me now.  He’p me, y’all…Let me take you there!” 

She’s not too proud to beg for help either.  “Play it, Barry,” she tells keyboardist Barry Beckett.  “Play your py-a-nuh now.”  Then she turns to her father’s guitar for help (though this guitar is actually played here by studio ace ): “Big Daddy now!”

“Davey, Little Davey,” she pleads next, imploring the Muscle Shoals bassist to help her take him there.  And then she helps him, singing the bass line with Hood in a voice more impossibly deep than ever.  “Mercy, mercy…,” she shouts near the end of the record. “You…gotta let me take you over there!”

It is hard to imagine a record more filled with the gospel impulse than “I’ll Take You There.”  Its genius lies in its willingness to take the gospel impulse beyond the provincial interests of the collection plate or next week’s Sunday school attendance, and even beyond the partisan winning and losing of individual souls to Christ, to a place—religious and secular at once—where it can face up to great human suffering and still know an optimism that tomorrow needn’t be so cloudy.

The church, Mavis says today, hated it.  In the sixties, when real progress seemed possible almost every day, the gospel community that gave birth to the Staple Singers embraced the group’s extra-religious adventures as relevant and necessary.  But after King’s assassination and the rise of a less focused, or at least less obviously successful black militancy, after Nixon’s southern strategy and silent majority, the times had changed and the church audience grew less generous.  It was like her grandmother was sending her out again for switches, mad because she was singing the blues.

“It was our transition to the contemporary gospel,” Mavis confirms, “that got us in trouble with the church.  ‘I’ll Take You There’ came out and suddenly The Staple Singers were singing the Devil’s music.  I’d tell people, the Devil don’t have no music.  All music is God’s music.

“I mean, I’m telling you I know a place.  Nobody crying, nobody worried.  Ain’t no smiling faces lying to the races.  Now where could I be taking you but to heaven?  But church people were upset because we had a rhythm section, instead of just my father’s guitar.”

The Staple Singers continued to score hits for a time, including a flat-out love song in 1975 called “Let’s Do It Again.” They made a famous guest appearance with the Band in The Last Waltz, they performed at Jimmy Carter’s inaugural, and in 1979, Pops and Mavis cut another version of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken, this time with George Jones and their old producer Billy Sherrill.

But as the seventies waned and the eighties emerged, the Staples Singers’ moment seemed over.  They would appear every so often with a new record on a new label, and every now and then Mavis would release another not very successful solo effort:  There was the soundtrack to A Piece of the Action in 1977, produced by her old friend Curtis Mayfield; an album in 1984 with Motown songwriters Holland Dozier Holland; and two spotty albums with Prince as the eighties turned to the nineties.  It looked like Mavis Staples’ moment was over too.
*****
Now, though, Mavis Staples, one of the great singers in American music, is creating a second act for herself.  She may never be as well known as she was during her Stax years, but lately she has been making some of the best work of her life.  Signs of renewed vigor were first spotted in 1996 when she released a stunning if little-known album-length collaboration with organist Lucky Peterson, Spirituals & Gospel: Dedicated to Mahalia Jackson.

After that record, though, her father’s poor health kept her mostly out of the spotlight for a time, and Pops’ death in 2000, at the age of 85, and her sister Cleotha’s death, threw her into a depression that kept her away from music still longer.  But now she’s making up for lost time.  In 2002, she recorded a fiercely rocking duet with Bob Dylan, “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking,” that was nominated for a Grammy.  And last year, she contributed another striking version of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” to Johnny’s Blues: A Tribute to Johnny Cash.

2004 may go down, at least for fans of gospel and soul music, as the Year of the Voice. So far this year, Mavis has appeared on the latest Los Lobos album singing “Someday,” and she provides lead vocals to two tracks, “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “Lay My Burden Down,” on Dr. John’s new album. And she also has recorded a track in tribute to Stephen Foster, “Hard Times Again No More,” and “Touch My Heart” in tribute to Johnny Paycheck. 

“I made it a point,” Mavis says by way of explanation for so many one-offs in so brief a period of time, “to get out there and be heard!  When someone asked me to sing, my first words were ‘Yes. When do you want me?’  Because I need to be heard, I need to sing, I’m happiest when I’m singing.”

Her new album was born from another isolated track.  After September11th, Chicago producer and songwriter Jim Tulio wrote a song, “In Times Like These,” that a friend told him would be ideal for Mavis Staples.  Mavis agreed, but the track wasn’t released because the charity for which it was slated never came to fruition.  The pair developed a friendship, however, and soon were recording an album for the Alligator label.

“I’ve already heard some people asking why I would go to a blues label? Well, why not? I feel safe with them,” she says, “like I won’t get lost in the shuffle.  Everyone wants to see children today, they want teenyboppers, but here I feel like I’m with grown people.”

The resulting Have a Little Faith is deeply informed by the blues.  The album begins with “Step into the Light,” where Mavis moans over an acoustic slide guitar before declaring, “Believe what you want, that no one will care when you die; the world keeps rolling by,” and the track ends with her anticipating a place where there is no more sorrow, no more pain and where “I will meet my dear old mother…[and] meet my loving father.” 

It’s an apt opening for an album that mourns Staples’ recent losses by honoring where her father came from and the lessons he taught her.  For example, a haunting yet hopeful version of “Dying Man’s Plea,” acoustic and gently funky and with a fiddle solo at the break, acknowledges her father’s Delta roots: “One kind favor I’ll ask of you,” she pleads. “See that my grave is kept clean.” And “Pops Recipe” shares her father’s wisdom with the world:  “He said accept responsibility; don’t forget humility; at every opportunity serve your artistry; don’t subscribe to bigotry, hypocrisy, duplicity; respect humanity.”

“He gave it to me, Yvie and Pervis, and Clevie too,” she affirms.

The album ends with a new “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” this time rendered as down home, front-porch blues. “There’s a better home a-waiting,” she declares, “in the sky, Lord, in the sky.”  Then she offers a strangled cry that seems to get at something beyond words; it acknowledges great suffering and, therefore, is delivered with great tenderness, and she conveys this felt wisdom with no words at all, just a husky, jagged gospel moan. 
 
“That song means so very much to me,” she says.  She pauses a moment to make sure she gets her words just right.  “You see, our circle has been broken.  My mother has passed on, my Pops passed on, my baby sister passed on.  It’s a song about death, but it’s a song about homecoming, too.  It’s a song about a place where the circle won’t be broken anymore and we’ll all meet up again, where we’ll have our circle again.

“It’s a song that says to me, and to you, and to everyone who hears me, ‘There’s a better home a-waiting.’”